30 B EFORE the Atlantic Alliance be- gan and NATO was conceived, no one expected American troops to remain in Europe more than a few months after the end of the war in that theatre. "A year or two at most," John J McCloy recently re- marked, recalling his conversations ahout postwar European security with Franklin Roosevelt before the war's end and with Harry Truman in the sober months of the early Cold War. No one then imagined that AmerIcan soldiers would still be in Europe thir- ty-five years later. The Atlantic Treaty relationship began in a simple U.S. military guar- antee to Europe and formal, although qualified, agreement among the North Atlantic nations to stand together against a Soviet attack. This modest degree of association was soon expand- ed Its original military dimensions were given an extremely ambitious po- lItical framework, in which some peo- ple even envisaged transatlantic politi- cal federation. Europe itself was cer- tainly urged to become a federal union on the American model, acting as a single power, expected to see things as America sees them, intimately a]igned with the UnIted States. Cus- < .. . : --- . ....... R.E..FLE..C TIONS FINLANDIZA TION tomary rhetoric held that ince the At- lantic nations were unIted by values and culture, a political union existed in potentza. ThIs was a great error. There IS much that the Atlantic nations have in common, but there is much that they do not, and the differences grow larg- er All have representative and demo- cratic governments. All are related in their historical culture. The Europeans have a political history in common, and much of it is blood-soaked. Those things which the Europeans possess in common have not spared them con- stant tension and a history of pillage and war. The last two apocalyptic exercises in European internal war- fare, and the consequent postwar vul- nerability of Europeans to the non- European powers, changed a great deal. But they did not turn ordInary EnglIshmen into Frenchmen, and the French are very different from the Germans. What those wars did accom- plish was to cause Europeans to dis- miss for the present, perhap for good, the recourse to war as an instrument of policy in dealing with one another. No one imagined thirty-five years ago that Western Europe would be considered weak-willed and compla- > ' r' . /'/. "Oh, it hasn't been all bad. There were parts of 1918,1925,1946, and 1947 that I ltked" cent, subject to what has come to be called Finlandization. The world had been plunged into two monstrous wars for exactly the opposite reason: that Europe was too strong-willed and too ambitious. Extravagantly so-a little mad, dangerous to all. Yet in the eyes of many Americans and some Euro- peans the West European countries today seem headed, heedlessly, toward Finland's condition-or a vulgarized and polemical notion of Finland's true condition. This can be defined as a condition of unfailing accommodation to the security demands of the Soviet Union. The West Europeans, some say, have abdicated morally; the polit- ical abdication is a matter of time. France is ordinarily held to be leading the way. Such is the interpretation that was placed upon French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's trip to Warsaw in May to meet Leonid Brezhnev. West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's subsequent visit to see Brezhnev in Moscow was preceded by an unpleasant controversy between him and President Jimmy Carter, dur- ing which the latter sent a letter that the former found "astonishing." En- suing conversations between the two in Venice, at the end of June, were described by German sources as "very rough," although a reconciliation of views was announced. In the important West German weekly Die Zeit, Gerd Bucerius re- cently wrote, "The Germans are eager to be left out of international conflicts." rrhe Germans are not alone. A Lon- don Times editorial in mid-May de- clared, "There is in fact no doubt that a current of opInion in Europe is flow- ing towards neutralism, 'Finlandiza- tion,' or whatever name is given to a policy of accommodating rather than confronting the Soviet Union." There is unmistakable hostility toward the United States. The German novelist Günter Grass accuses the United States government of talking "Soviet lan- guage" and says that because of Vietnam it has no moral right to crit- icize anyone. The Iranian radicals who took American diplomats hostage, Grass says, have used an unjust meth- od, but in the intoxication of liberation. Another German writer, Klaus Harp- precht, comments that for Germans "impotence is being translated into rhetoric and resentment." Behind it, he says, there are "sparks of hate." The evidence for what Harpprecht